last I heard they had some major problems with galvanic reactions from the ground-up radial belts.
I would imagine that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to build a process that removes ferrous materials from rubber. Melting all the rubber and sticking a big magnet into the goo is one thing that comes to mind. I believe one other metal used in tires is brass, but that shouldn't be as prone to corrosion.
The fault lies in those people who don't patch the operating system with the critical updates put out by its maker.
No, the fault still lies greatly in the hands of Microsoft. They build a system, market it as drool-proof, drooling idiots all over the world buy it, and those drooling idiots get burned and are still so stupid that they don't realize they were LIED TO IN THE FIRST PLACE!
So the blame is two-fold. 1) Microsoft is an unscrupulous LIAR, and 2) Microsoft's customers are stupid IDIOTS.
Thankfully, the markets are very slowly but steadily learning, and I am optimistic that Microsoft will much much smaller in five years.
And how much have they made in Gained Productivity by providing tools for people to generate complicated spreadsheets / print their own stationary / produce business winning presentations?
Citing Microsoft for gained productivity is fallacious. CPU/RAM/Disk speed and capacity increases should be given more credit, as word processing and spreadsheets have not improved dramatically in well over a decade.
Even in the late 1980's my Commodore 64 with GEOS and a Okidata printer did very good word processing. Microsoft has done nothing other than genius marketing and spinning information until most people can't think of anything but their products.
When will people realize that Microsoft's main business is not even technology?
Microsoft actually seems to be getting better about security.
Microsoft's feet are already so full of lead from past bad decision making, that it will take them years to recover. I always figured that Windows was around 50 million LOC or so, but someone mentioned 100 million for Windows 2000 (holy shit that's a lot of code, either way). Now, I challenge any group of any size to debug the massive pile of poo that must be within that millions of LOC. Hell, I don't even have to deal with 100 thousand lines, and debugging is hard.
My theory: Fixing Windows is not possible. My suggestion for a Microsoft customer: send some of your admins to UNIX training, have them figure out OpenBSD, and migrate to an OpenBSD-based network infrastructure with UNIX and Linux for general-purpose servers. Use Samba for serving remaining Windows clients. No matter what, Windows should be kept only as a client system; it should never be used on a server.
I'm sorry to reply again, but the weight of the rest of your post just struck me.
auto-deduct/electronic billing
No one should ever allow any company priviledges to deduct money from personal accounts. This is just ripe for abuse or accidents (one person I know had his account overdrawn by an insurance company).
DTE simply *stole* my MSN Passport
MSN Passport is a bad idea, period. It puts your eggs in a very fragile basket, and Microsoft is not a good steward of personal information.
Do they think that I'd be happy to trust *Microsoft* with my checking account?
Of course they do. Any opportunity they have to gain power of their customers they will take. It is up to consumers to make companies work harder for their business.
Democracy and Capitalism are mutally exclusive.
This is absolutely not true. Absolutely 110% not true. Most of the identity theft problems we have today are directly due to poor decision making by the federal government. Social Security (massive invasion of privacy) is a bad idea, income taxes (more massive invasion of privacy) are a bad idea, gun registrations are a bad idea (even more invasion of privacy), and on and on. The problems we face today are based on opportunities given on a silver platter to corporations by the federal government.
But instead, I called up, reported the event and switched back to the old mail-it-to-me method of compensation. It is worth it.
This thread is generally about the odds of identity theft. I wonder what the odds are of the company you called pulling the DMCA on you, suing you for your accidental access, and covering the whole thing up.
Are companies handling good-faith vulnerability reporting responsibly, or is the law so vague and broad that consumers shouldn't even want to tell their vendors about problems? Is this a matter of consumers needing to not act to protect themselves, while criminals have a field day with covered-up system vulnerabilities?
A BCBS rep told me over a year ago they were phasing them out
The new BCBS cards I got definitely no longer have the SSN on them, which is a relief. Now, my wallet is a SSN-free zone.
I still don't understand why voter registration cards have social security information on them. This means I have to remember to not forget my voter card each time an election comes around.
...you may think it is funny to joke about shooting babies...
You know what is even funnier? After all the babies are gone, we come after the ACs!
(sounds of thousands of rifles loading and cocking can now be heard across cyberspace)
You know, as a lazy pasty white, pear shaped, stinky nerd myself, my first meal is going to be some of that tasty pre-cooked flamebait just ahead of me and in my sights! HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
"Couldn't I have done something better with those 30 minutes than just walked to the bank?"
A 30 minute walk can be very rewarding. For example, my favorite job of all time was the one where I lived only one mile from work. I walked to work every day, rain or shine. It really beats being stuck in traffic for 30 minutes stuck next to 1200 watt losermobiles and asshole tailgaters.
I predict your scenario wouldn't happen, because everyone will realize just how rediculous the commercial aspect of Christmas is. If anything, everyone will just gather for a reunion of thier 15,000 extended family members and actually celebrate Christmas, for once.
..then perhaps the rich and powerful would start actually caring about the environment, seeing as they're more likely to live to see the long term effects of their actions.
No, they would just colonize one of the nicer moons of Jupiter. Earth would be the slums.
It just gives me more time to subjugate all humans and rule the earth with an iron fist.
It could be that mortality is nature's way of telling all of us, "Give someone else a chance." People can be very stubborn. Imagine if the rise to immortality is coupled with a rise of World War II style fascism that lasted forever.
Should we all become immortal, I suspect a lot more people will be using a lot more Viagra.
Or any drugs, in general. Unless suburban sprawl, the inner city, and crappy government are disbanded along with the rise to immortality, there will be many many very frustrated and depressed people looking for an escape. Also, imagine having to wait for four weeks in line at the DMV, just because it litterally costs you nothing to wait that long. After all, you are immortal. Immortality coupled with bureaucracy will probably be hell on earth, literally.
I wonder if they'll start coming up with new levels of experience?
Actually, with immortality, time becomes very very cheap. The professional programmer might just become obselete, as there would be no rush to do anything. Why create a system for electronic banking, when it is only a 30-minute walk to the bank to do transactions in person? Sure, electronic systems would exist on a certain scale--but the thresholds are much higher when time is no longer equated with money.
...will the kind of stuff I do become more important in an immortal world, or will people simply give up on trying to bridge vastly differing specialties?
If you can remember the variety of things you've done over the last 200 years, then hats off to you. I can barely remember stuff from last week--so much for being a generalist in the immortal era.
When the surveillence society is complete, there will be 400 year old people condemned for what they did when they were 19. This is especially a problem as culture evolves and ideas about morality change. I think the suicide rate will be very high.
This also reminds me of the cyborg-agents in that Deus Ex game, where older models were considered inferior to newer ones. We could have social classes based on augmentation. I'm not sure this is a good thing.
That sounds great on paper, but I've never really seen it work out in practice.
Sure, we've all writing massively pipeline shell one-liners to do day-to-day tasks, but these are just one-time, throw-away code.
You just contradicted yourself, here. The fact that a quick one-liner can solve a modest problem in short order is a testament to the success of UNIX. For example, I once needed a one-time list of all calls to a particular API in a particluar program (find, egrep, and sed saved the day).
My newsreader and mailreader again, monolithic applications.
The major differentiating factor, here, is whether a program is interactive. Some smaller programs have a simple pipe interface but then become much more monolithic in nature when used stand-alone (take the "mail" program, for example). Even vi is monolithic, but it is a tool to a different type of end (creating and changing text interactively).
For some modern applications, such as working with pictures, small apps added to the old apps can work. For other applications, such as 3D design, the current suite of small apps don't work.
This is because 3D design (e.g., CAD) is perhaps one of the most complex problem domains I can imagine. Capturing, dimensioning, tolerancing, and finishing a part in Pro/ENGINEER, for example, requires calling hundreds of different aspects of the UI into action. Pro/ENGINEER itself--in all its massive glory--is the simple tool that can, then, be chained with other tools, such as quality control or process planning tools. The UNIX pipeline could work, here, too, but imagine "big_ass_proe | big_ass_qa | big_ass_cam" rather than "cat file.txt | grep foo | wc -l".
On a side note, it's a major failing of the educational system in the US that NOTHING is taught about budgets, finances, etc. in grade school.
But, then, how would cash loan stores, credit card companies, debt consolodation companies, and extended warranty companies make their livings? How?!?
There is a whole entrenched industry that survives on the backs of ignorant people who are buried under their own financial mistakes. If we educate the masses, think of all the telemarketers that will be put out of work! What of the Best Buy extended warranty commissions?
Are you insane? We need to keep our kiddies as uneducated as possible so that the banks can financially rape them of their savings and their own ability to educate their children!
(I hope you read my sarcasm...I whole-heartedly think that finance should rank at least as high as state history and physical science in Junior High School)
Slashdot Mirror
last I heard they had some major problems with galvanic reactions from the ground-up radial belts.
I would imagine that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to build a process that removes ferrous materials from rubber. Melting all the rubber and sticking a big magnet into the goo is one thing that comes to mind. I believe one other metal used in tires is brass, but that shouldn't be as prone to corrosion.
The fault lies in those people who don't patch the operating system with the critical updates put out by its maker.
No, the fault still lies greatly in the hands of Microsoft. They build a system, market it as drool-proof, drooling idiots all over the world buy it, and those drooling idiots get burned and are still so stupid that they don't realize they were LIED TO IN THE FIRST PLACE!
So the blame is two-fold. 1) Microsoft is an unscrupulous LIAR, and 2) Microsoft's customers are stupid IDIOTS.
Thankfully, the markets are very slowly but steadily learning, and I am optimistic that Microsoft will much much smaller in five years.
And how much have they made in Gained Productivity by providing tools for people to generate complicated spreadsheets / print their own stationary / produce business winning presentations?
Citing Microsoft for gained productivity is fallacious. CPU/RAM/Disk speed and capacity increases should be given more credit, as word processing and spreadsheets have not improved dramatically in well over a decade.
Even in the late 1980's my Commodore 64 with GEOS and a Okidata printer did very good word processing. Microsoft has done nothing other than genius marketing and spinning information until most people can't think of anything but their products.
When will people realize that Microsoft's main business is not even technology?
Microsoft actually seems to be getting better about security.
Microsoft's feet are already so full of lead from past bad decision making, that it will take them years to recover. I always figured that Windows was around 50 million LOC or so, but someone mentioned 100 million for Windows 2000 (holy shit that's a lot of code, either way). Now, I challenge any group of any size to debug the massive pile of poo that must be within that millions of LOC. Hell, I don't even have to deal with 100 thousand lines, and debugging is hard.
My theory: Fixing Windows is not possible. My suggestion for a Microsoft customer: send some of your admins to UNIX training, have them figure out OpenBSD, and migrate to an OpenBSD-based network infrastructure with UNIX and Linux for general-purpose servers. Use Samba for serving remaining Windows clients. No matter what, Windows should be kept only as a client system; it should never be used on a server.
I'm sorry to reply again, but the weight of the rest of your post just struck me.
auto-deduct/electronic billing
No one should ever allow any company priviledges to deduct money from personal accounts. This is just ripe for abuse or accidents (one person I know had his account overdrawn by an insurance company).
DTE simply *stole* my MSN Passport
MSN Passport is a bad idea, period. It puts your eggs in a very fragile basket, and Microsoft is not a good steward of personal information.
Do they think that I'd be happy to trust *Microsoft* with my checking account?
Of course they do. Any opportunity they have to gain power of their customers they will take. It is up to consumers to make companies work harder for their business.
Democracy and Capitalism are mutally exclusive.
This is absolutely not true. Absolutely 110% not true. Most of the identity theft problems we have today are directly due to poor decision making by the federal government. Social Security (massive invasion of privacy) is a bad idea, income taxes (more massive invasion of privacy) are a bad idea, gun registrations are a bad idea (even more invasion of privacy), and on and on. The problems we face today are based on opportunities given on a silver platter to corporations by the federal government.
But instead, I called up, reported the event and switched back to the old mail-it-to-me method of compensation. It is worth it.
This thread is generally about the odds of identity theft. I wonder what the odds are of the company you called pulling the DMCA on you, suing you for your accidental access, and covering the whole thing up.
Are companies handling good-faith vulnerability reporting responsibly, or is the law so vague and broad that consumers shouldn't even want to tell their vendors about problems? Is this a matter of consumers needing to not act to protect themselves, while criminals have a field day with covered-up system vulnerabilities?
A BCBS rep told me over a year ago they were phasing them out
The new BCBS cards I got definitely no longer have the SSN on them, which is a relief. Now, my wallet is a SSN-free zone.
I still don't understand why voter registration cards have social security information on them. This means I have to remember to not forget my voter card each time an election comes around.
Who would have thought that Conan the Barbarian was prophetic? Now playing: Conan the Infringer starring James Earl Jones as Darl McBride!
...you may think it is funny to joke about shooting babies...
You know what is even funnier? After all the babies are gone, we come after the ACs!
(sounds of thousands of rifles loading and cocking can now be heard across cyberspace)
You know, as a lazy pasty white, pear shaped, stinky nerd myself, my first meal is going to be some of that tasty pre-cooked flamebait just ahead of me and in my sights! HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Watch out! A burrito tsunami is coming!
"Couldn't I have done something better with those 30 minutes than just walked to the bank?"
A 30 minute walk can be very rewarding. For example, my favorite job of all time was the one where I lived only one mile from work. I walked to work every day, rain or shine. It really beats being stuck in traffic for 30 minutes stuck next to 1200 watt losermobiles and asshole tailgaters.
Christmas shopping
I predict your scenario wouldn't happen, because everyone will realize just how rediculous the commercial aspect of Christmas is. If anything, everyone will just gather for a reunion of thier 15,000 extended family members and actually celebrate Christmas, for once.
..then perhaps the rich and powerful would start actually caring about the environment, seeing as they're more likely to live to see the long term effects of their actions.
No, they would just colonize one of the nicer moons of Jupiter. Earth would be the slums.
It just gives me more time to subjugate all humans and rule the earth with an iron fist.
It could be that mortality is nature's way of telling all of us, "Give someone else a chance." People can be very stubborn. Imagine if the rise to immortality is coupled with a rise of World War II style fascism that lasted forever.
Should we all become immortal, I suspect a lot more people will be using a lot more Viagra.
Or any drugs, in general. Unless suburban sprawl, the inner city, and crappy government are disbanded along with the rise to immortality, there will be many many very frustrated and depressed people looking for an escape. Also, imagine having to wait for four weeks in line at the DMV, just because it litterally costs you nothing to wait that long. After all, you are immortal. Immortality coupled with bureaucracy will probably be hell on earth, literally.
I wonder if they'll start coming up with new levels of experience?
Actually, with immortality, time becomes very very cheap. The professional programmer might just become obselete, as there would be no rush to do anything. Why create a system for electronic banking, when it is only a 30-minute walk to the bank to do transactions in person? Sure, electronic systems would exist on a certain scale--but the thresholds are much higher when time is no longer equated with money.
...will the kind of stuff I do become more important in an immortal world, or will people simply give up on trying to bridge vastly differing specialties?
If you can remember the variety of things you've done over the last 200 years, then hats off to you. I can barely remember stuff from last week--so much for being a generalist in the immortal era.
When the surveillence society is complete, there will be 400 year old people condemned for what they did when they were 19. This is especially a problem as culture evolves and ideas about morality change. I think the suicide rate will be very high.
This also reminds me of the cyborg-agents in that Deus Ex game, where older models were considered inferior to newer ones. We could have social classes based on augmentation. I'm not sure this is a good thing.
Don't reinvent the wheel.
Who has the courage to tell this to all the "me too" projects hosted on Sourceforge?
That sounds great on paper, but I've never really seen it work out in practice.
Sure, we've all writing massively pipeline shell one-liners to do day-to-day tasks, but these are just one-time, throw-away code.
You just contradicted yourself, here. The fact that a quick one-liner can solve a modest problem in short order is a testament to the success of UNIX. For example, I once needed a one-time list of all calls to a particular API in a particluar program (find, egrep, and sed saved the day).
My newsreader and mailreader again, monolithic applications.
The major differentiating factor, here, is whether a program is interactive. Some smaller programs have a simple pipe interface but then become much more monolithic in nature when used stand-alone (take the "mail" program, for example). Even vi is monolithic, but it is a tool to a different type of end (creating and changing text interactively).
If is a continual source of amazement to me that GNU tools (eg, tar -AcdrtuxbBCfFGhijykKlLmMnNoOpPRsSTIUvVwWXZz7) are widely used despite this.
Agreed. However, it isn't just GNU who are guilty of violating UNIX philosophy, but also commands like rpm, from Red Hat.
The title of this article should be "Linux and the UNIX Philosophy: where did Linux go awry?".
I think it stems from something a wise man said once: "Why? Well, because!".
...a simple 4GL compiler entirely in shell and sed...
If a geek goes to hell, this project will be their eternal punishment.
For some modern applications, such as working with pictures, small apps added to the old apps can work. For other applications, such as 3D design, the current suite of small apps don't work.
This is because 3D design (e.g., CAD) is perhaps one of the most complex problem domains I can imagine. Capturing, dimensioning, tolerancing, and finishing a part in Pro/ENGINEER, for example, requires calling hundreds of different aspects of the UI into action. Pro/ENGINEER itself--in all its massive glory--is the simple tool that can, then, be chained with other tools, such as quality control or process planning tools. The UNIX pipeline could work, here, too, but imagine "big_ass_proe | big_ass_qa | big_ass_cam" rather than "cat file.txt | grep foo | wc -l".
On a side note, it's a major failing of the educational system in the US that NOTHING is taught about budgets, finances, etc. in grade school.
But, then, how would cash loan stores, credit card companies, debt consolodation companies, and extended warranty companies make their livings? How?!?
There is a whole entrenched industry that survives on the backs of ignorant people who are buried under their own financial mistakes. If we educate the masses, think of all the telemarketers that will be put out of work! What of the Best Buy extended warranty commissions?
Are you insane? We need to keep our kiddies as uneducated as possible so that the banks can financially rape them of their savings and their own ability to educate their children!
(I hope you read my sarcasm...I whole-heartedly think that finance should rank at least as high as state history and physical science in Junior High School)
I no longer have the time, they lost my window of opportunity.
:)
:)
I'm in favor of working up a financial app in XUL, making it Mozilla-based and completely cross-platform. Anyone interested?
Are you?